My grandmother´s family. My great-grandmother´s family were Franco supporters, my great-grandfather´s were socialists, by Carla Arroyo.

INTERVIEW

My name is Carla Arroyo and I am 16 years old. I have interviewed my grandmother Mercedes.  She lived during the post-war.

She lived with her grandparents, her parents and her brother and sister. Her father worked in iron melting and her mother was a housewife.

She went to school until she was 11 years old. She said that they only had a blackboard and an encyclopaedia for everyone. When she left school she started to work as a cleaner.

She remembers that she went with her mother and their friends to buy on the black market  things that they couldn`t get in their town like ham, sausages...

My grandmother was very lucky because during the postwar she lived in the Franco`s area and  her mother`s family were Franco’s supporters and they could get whatever they wanted but her father and her grandfather were socialists and they had a lot of problems with the police. Her father was in prison twice for insulting Franco but after three days his uncle who was a military man picked him up. She also  remembers that one day the police went to their house and they dug in their garden looking for weapons because a neighbour told them that he had a lot of weapons.

She told me that before that incident the relationship with the neighbours improved and everybody was friends and there was confidence between them. They could leave the doors of their houses open all day and no one came to steal them. If someone had a TV they invited everybody else to watch it and young people were more polite and they respected older people and now they respect nothing.

She remembers that when she was a child people had nothing and they were very happy but nowadays people have whatever they want and they are unhappy.

For my grandmother the dictatorship of Franco is the best time she has lived and she says that electricity and water bills were paid by Franco´s Government and now we have to pay  even for breathing.